This real-life home was built completely out of Legos. (Photo: www.dailymail.co.uk)
My daughter sent me this link the other day about the world’s first full-sized, functioning house made of LEGOs. We have a fondness for LEGOs at our house. My husband mentioned wistfully last year that he’d never had any LEGOs as a kid – I hadn’t known that -- so I got him a small castle-building set for Christmas as a stocking stuffer. He was genuinely thrilled, and played with it for most of the day. He especially liked the working catapult.
Needless to say, the LEGO house in England took considerably longer than my husband’s miniature castle. It was built by 1,000 volunteers, working with British TV personality James May, who has a new show in the works called "James May’s Toy Stories." He got the 3.3 million plastic building bricks from the manufacturer, which has a LEGOLAND theme park in Windsor, England.
As a house, it has issues. It's short on any kind of architectural style -- it's basically a 20-foot-tall box with a lid. It certainly isn't consistent with the existing homes in the area, something that gets builders in trouble all the time. May admitted in the article that the roof leaked. And since the entire thing is plastic, it's hardly environmentally friendly.
To its credit, the house has – or had -- a working toilet, a hot shower, and a spiffy color scheme. It also had a LEGO cat and, according to the Daily Mail, an incredibly uncomfortable bed. In the article, a miffed May said he was being forced by the folks at LEGO to tear the house down because it proved too difficult to move, an experience with which most LEGO builders can empathize.
That, apparently, is exactly what has happened. LEGO UK has announced that the bricks it donated for the house are going to be displayed at the park "so that thousands of families will have the opportunity of building with them next season." According to them, the house was always intended to be temporary. Besides, kids have always built things with LEGOs, torn them down, and then built something else. I suppose they have a point there.
Readers: In honor of this new milestone in plastic building brick history, tell me the coolest thing you ever built out of LEGOs. Or, what you’d want in a LEGO house. For me, it would be a pot filler faucet at the stove or an in-the-wall espresso maker. No, wait, that’s what I want in my real house. —Pat Curry